I recall a guy I respect, Marc Williams, preferring the Leica 35/1.4, in R from memory. It's hard to disagree strongly with the Leica preference, such a fine style. Interesting the vintages of these two and similar. Maybe what has happened is that lens producers adopted the modern idea of seeking all round excellence, especially WRT corner to corner performance using asph in WAs; my thought was that back then in film times they looked more for picture impact that flowed from a more relaxed balance of aberration control, the image appearance being sacrosanct - no screens or 100% views then, just prints up to 10x8 or so. Happy to be wrong about this idle speculation.

ZF 35/1.4 for me as well, I prefer it to the CV 35/1.2 that I also own. Beautiful bokeh and less offensive CA in tougher lighting. The field curves towards the camera at the edges, accentuating the subject isolation. I hate curvature in the opposite direction for portraits personally, so a big plus for me with the ZF. Only reason mine doesn't see more action is the weight/bulk.

philip_pj wrote:
I recall a guy I respect, Marc Williams, preferring the Leica 35/1.4, in R from memory. It's hard to disagree strongly with the Leica preference, such a fine style. Interesting the vintages of these two and similar. Maybe what has happened is that lens producers adopted the modern idea of seeking all round excellence, especially WRT corner to corner performance using asph in WAs; my thought was that back then in film times they looked more for picture impact that flowed from a more relaxed balance of aberration control, the image appearance being sacrosanct - no screens or 100% views then, just prints up to 10x8 or so. Happy to be wrong about this idle speculation....Show more →

It's possible, though everything I've read about the Mandler-era at Leica points to the idea that the engineers and designers were working under some fairly prohibitive financial and manufacturing restrictions because there wasn't an appetite from the buying public for the price of more complicated designs.

"In former times Leitz Wetzlar tried to construct improved high-speed 50mm lenses by incorporating aspherical elements into the design (e.g., the Noctilux 50mm f/1.2). However, Leitz abandoned this concept due to the extreme difficulty and cost entailed in producing glass aspherical elements by traditional grinding methods at that time. The new Summilux 35mm f/1.4 ASPH was the first lens we produced using a molded aspherical lens element. And significantly it was also the first aspherical lens delivering the highest level of optical performance that we were able to produce economically at a profit."